This year’s best reads for adults help us better understand ourselves

Illustration by Victor Juhasz.

With the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the most troops overseas since Richard Nixon’s presidency, President-elect Obama will certainly have his work cut out for him. But at least Obama is a reader (and a writer), and, as we all know, there is no better antidote to the stress of the present than an hour or so lost in a good book. This year’s selection of great reads—for President Obama as well as the rest of us—was created to help us better understand our past, our present, our brave new future. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Atwood, Margaret. House of Anansi. 280 p. Trust Margaret Atwood, the Canadian Booker Prize–winner and best-selling author of dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, to penetrate the economic heart of darkness: debt. These five essays were taken from Atwood’s 2008 Massey Lectures, which were broadcast on CBC’s Radio One. (To hear them, visit www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey.html.) Self-revelatory and anecdotally rich, the essays are mind-expanding and often downright funny. For Atwood, “payback is not about debt management, or sleep debt, or the national debt.” Instead, she views debt as human and imaginative, something that “magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.” She limns the literary, cultural, and historical aspects of debt—concluding that it has much more to do with human nature than economics—and ransacks history, literature, pop culture, and even theology, drawing on personalities both real and imagined (like Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge and Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck). Clever and timely, Atwood’s essays are a lot more engaging than anything you’re likely to find in The Economist. The Numerati. Baker, Stephen. Houghton. 256 p. Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek and coauthor of blogspotting.net—a blog that examines how “cutting-edge technologies are changing business and society”—introduces readers to the men and women of the “new math intelligentsia” and explores the changes in technology and data crunching that underlie most of today’s sophisticated marketing and business plans. Baker shows us how these new data profilers are using a ginormous amount of online data to predict trends and anticipate the actions of all sorts of groups—from consumers and voters to gamblers and potential terrorists. At the core of this work are algorithms, which come into play whenever we visit an online merchant like Amazon.com, where, for example, a sophisticated set of programming commands present us with shopping options based on our past purchases. Happily, the work of these “numerati” isn’t all profit driven. Google’s recent announcement that as a result of a spike in the number of searches for “flu and flu-like symptoms” it was able to predict the onset of influenza a full two weeks before the Centers for Disease Control is an example of how this data can become a force for good. (To learn more about Google’s prediction, go to www.google.org/flutrends.) In fact, one of the numerati that Baker interviewed predicted that the world’s next Jonas Salk will probably be a mathematician—not a physician. Now what are the odds of that? The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully. Chittister, Joan. BlueBridge. 240 p. By 2020, 18 percent of our nation will be more than 65 years old. If you’re already in the 65-plus column or will enter it in the next 12 years or have grandparents or parents in that age bracket, this book is for you. Chittister, who’s a spry 72, is a Roman Catholic Benedictine nun and cochair of the United Nations Global Peace Initiative for Women. In a series of interconnected meditative essays, she explores “the many dimensions of the aging process, its purpose and its challenges, its struggles and its surprises, its problems and its potential, its pain and joys.” Although a few of her chapters read like a Gray Panthers manifesto, most reveal the author’s breathtakingly frank and clear-eyed awareness that old age is all about “facing that time of life for which there is no career plan.” While aging may have been the catalyst for these meditations, don’t put off reading them until you’re officially an old codger. We can all draw strength from Chittister’s essays on regret (“the sand trap of the soul”), nostalgia (“the temptation to take refuge in what is no more”), and forgiveness (which allows us to “forgive ourselves for being less than we always wanted to be”). She reminds readers of all generations that aging doesn’t have to be a depressing series of losses culminating in a decline toward death. Instead, she says, getting older has allowed her “to come alive in ways I have never been alive before.” This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Faust, Drew Gilpin. Knopf. 346 p. What makes a “good death”? In mid-19th-century America, it meant taking time to carefully scrutinize one’s life, select a final resting place, and remember others who had previously died. Families wanted to know that their dying loved ones were well prepared to meet God within the bosom of their family. (The affecting death scene Louisa May Alcott crafted for Beth in Little Women is a prototype of a good death.) Unfortunately, a good death was unavailable to many of the 620,000 Confederate and Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Faust, the president of Harvard University, demonstrates how the “work of death” uniquely characterized the war and its aftermath. Parents were often not informed of the fate of their deceased sons—there was no plan in place. There were also no dog tags. As soldiers prepared for battle, they pinned pieces of paper on their uniforms with information for their next of kin. Combatants often carried a small Bible or a pocket diary—partly for themselves and partly to assure their families that they had been well disposed at the hour of their death. Soldiers also prized family photos. In fact, many fallen soldiers were found with photos in hand. There were few marked graves, and many soldiers were buried in open, mass graves to avoid contagion. One enduring benefit of the otherwise disastrous Civil War was the creation of organized care for the living and the dying: the American Red Cross and the founding of our national cemeteries. Brilliant and inclusive, this is moving social history. Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. Marcus, Gary. Houghton. 224 p. Marcus, a cognitive neuroscientist and psychology professor, launches some spirited salvos against the intelligent design movement. He carefully marshals research on the brain and cognitive development to counter the belief that we and, most especially, our brains are perfect as originally created. For Marcus, the human mind is definitely imperfect and far from being made “in God’s image.” Furthermore, the human brain is a “kluge—an engineering term for a clumsy or inelegant, yet surprisingly effective, solution to a problem.” Stymied? Think about your brain as a crafty solution cooked up by TV secret agent Angus MacGyver. Why else would the human brain have such a superb capacity for reasoning paired with a seriously flawed memory system and a tendency to neglect the facts when making choices? Along the way, Marcus also reflects on why happiness is nearly always elusive, why human language is essentially ambiguous and communication so complicated, and why we develop false memories. He also reminds us that there’s a neurological reason why teens are innately susceptible to suggestion and impetuous to boot (as if we didn’t already know that). After all, the teenage brain is wired for pleasure, not for analysis. When all is said and done, the human brain is prima facie a product of evolution, a “series of little fixes.” So the next time you find yourself disoriented while trying to multitask or distracted by some shiny object, remember that our brains are a work in progress—and cut yourself some slack. The Great Swim. Mortimer, Gavin. Walker. 336 p. Before super-swimmers Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz captured Olympic gold, there was Gertrude Ederle. The daughter of a German-born butcher from New York City, Ederle was already an Olympic gold medalist when, in 1925, she swam 21 miles from the Battery in Lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook, NJ, in 7 hours and 11 minutes (a record that remained unbroken until 2006). The next summer Ederle, along with five other women, attempted to swim the English Channel. A precursor to today’s reality TV shows, the swimmers were sponsored by tabloid newspapers and readers aligned themselves with their favorites, turning a friendly competition into a media circus. Mortimer includes wonderful details about Ederle’s training, her scandalous two-piece bathing suit emblazoned with an American flag, a diet that would shock today’s sports nutritionists, and the required “greasing up” (layering on olive oil, lanolin, and Vaseline) to protect her skin from the cold waters. The swim across the Channel was grueling. When Ederle emerged on the shores of Kent, England, after 14 hours and 39 minutes (breaking the male record by a full two hours), the media attention was overwhelming. On her return to the United States, Ederle was honored by a ticker-tape parade and hounded by enormous crowds. Sadly, fame was fleeting. Nine months later, aviator Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic solo flight eclipsed all other achievements, and Ederle was kicked to the curb. Nevertheless, her record for swimming the Channel stood until 1950. Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines. Muller, Richard A. Norton. 354 p. Muller, a physics professor and winner of a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, prepared this accessible briefing based on his renowned course for nonscience students. While every president has a bevy of science advisors, Muller’s book can serve as a primer for the rest of us; it provides a clear understanding of the major scientific trends and challenges that will affect our lives during the next four to eight years. Broad essays on topical matters, such as terrorism, energy, nukes, space, and global warming, are divided into comprehensible subsections. And for those of us who are time-challenged, each section’s final “Presidential Summary” serves up just the facts. Some of Muller’s analyses buck conventional wisdom. For example, writing about terrorism, he cautions that low-tech attacks may be harder to defend against than their high-tech counterparts (witness the recent spate of terrorist raids in Mumbai) and a natural gas explosion may be a greater threat to urban dwellers than the aftermath of a so-called “dirty bomb.” Understandable and genuinely fascinating, this is the best sort of required reading. Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures. Saltzman, Cynthia. Viking. 352 p. Next time you’re viewing a painting by a European Old Master in an American museum take a careful look at the label. Did you know that the core collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Washington’s National Gallery, and many other smaller museums are the products of a very public largesse? In the 19th century, our newly minted museums were desperately seeking cultural credibility. Increasingly, it became the fashion for wealthy entrepreneurs to go abroad and greedily gobble up vast amounts of European painting, sculpture, and architectural fragments. These exported treasures boosted their new owners’ social standings even as they provided our museums with the “right” sort of art that demonstrated that Americans could possess refined cultural sensibilities every bit as elevated as the ancien régimes. Saltzman, a skilled art historian, is no slouch when it comes to explaining the social history of the Gilded Age, and she introduces readers to such compelling and single-minded personalities as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick (a Carnegie protégé and a steel tycoon in his own right), and the renowned financier J. P. Morgan. Begun for private pleasure, the Frick, Gardner, and Morgan collections, still housed in their original opulent mansions, have since morphed into unique public treasures. Meticulously researched and wonderfully detailed, Old Masters is a real eye-opener. Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid. Troost, J. Maarten. Broadway. 304 p. With the world becoming smaller and more homogenized by the second, Troost thinks the next (and perhaps final) great journey for Westerners will be to China—an enormous country (3.7 million square miles) with a huge population (over 1.3 billion people) and the world’s largest economic engine. Though most Westerners now depend on China’s consumer products, relatively few of us have traveled beyond its well-worn tourist routes, and even fewer have begun to grasp its vast human, economic, linguistic, and geographic diversity. Troost is a wacky, 21st-century Marco Polo who successfully integrates history, economics, politics, and Chinese high and low culture into a fast-paced narrative that’s self-deprecating, refreshingly ironic, and often laugh-out-loud funny. He muses on China’s often startling juxtaposition of the ancient and modern and the relentless pressures on the former communal society to adjust to capitalism’s triumph over communism. While Troost chronicles such unappealing Chinese ticks as spitting, crowding, and a penchant for jumping lines, he also reveals a culture of unrelenting hard work, love of children, and an ever-present sense of history. As the subtitle suggests, the author shares enough tales about extreme cuisine to rival the exploits of star chef Anthony Bourdain. If you read only one book about China this year, be sure it’s this one. And while you’re at it, consider enrolling the kids in a Mandarin class. According to Troost, they’re going to need it. Soon. Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Wartzman, Rick. Public Affairs. 320 p. In April 1939, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath shot to the top of our nation’s best-seller lists. Meanwhile, throughout California’s San Joaquin Valley (the destination of the fictional Joads and other “Oakies” who fled the Dust Bowl), the publication of this masterpiece brought long-standing social and political unrest to a head. Steinbeck, a native of Salinas, CA, was vilified as a radical, rabble-rousing writer of the shocking and obscene. And that same month, Grapes was publicly banned by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, who asserted that the novel “offended our citizenry by falsely implying that many of our fine people are a low, ignorant, profane, and blasphemous type living in a vicious and filthy manner.” Plus, it “is filled with profanity, lewd, foul, and obscene language unfit for use in American homes.” Kern County Librarian Gretchen Kneif was particularly eloquent in her letter to the library board: “If a book is banned today, what will be banned tomorrow? …It’s such a vicious and dangerous thing to begin and may… lead to… the same thing we see in Europe today.” Two years later, the ban was lifted, though Steinbeck’s works continued to be under siege. This is compelling social history and an incisive case study of censorship in action.

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Barbara A. Genco, b.genco@BrooklynPublicLibrary.org, a veteran of 25 years in public library collection development, is now leading the Brooklyn Public Library’s strategic planning program.